Saturday, January 27, 2018

ADS-B plane tracking on raspberry pi

An enjoyable meeting of the ARNSW Home Brew Group at Dural today. Along with the general social catch up, sausage sizzle, cups of tea and cordial, there was a trash and treasure. I came away with a nice big Ammeter that might do well in the van.

I presented about tracking planes' ADS-B locations using an RTL-SDR dongle the fantastic Malcolm Robb fork of dump1090 running on a Raspberry Pi. It looks like he hasn't updated it since 2014 but it sill builds and works well on a Pi.

A fresh install of Raspbian comes with all the developer tools needed and you only need to install rtl-sdr and librtlsdr-dev to get what you need to make dump1090.

In my presentation I demonstrated a build and run of the software. The shed at Dural is rather well shielded and we only saw a few planes using the indoor antenna.

Peter, VK2EMU, showed a fantastic looking 3D CNC machine from China that he's building that costs about $200 and might be suitable for PCB fabrication. (Note that it's too early to tell if this is actually a good deal).

John, VK2ASU, is turning into a C programmer and showed a touch screen controller for a rig he's building.

Great to see everyone and thanks to John, VK2ASU, for the photo of me above.